Biden: Plan to kill bin Laden most audacious in half a millennium

From the Vice President at a fundraiser in New Jersey, these quotes have come out of pool reports:

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.

With all due respect to our SEAL brethren, I only had to go back a few decades to the Son Tay raid. So I’ll write the VP’s remark off as the typical hubris and hyperbole of politics and the usual historic ignorance (see Rutherford B. Hayes) this crew displays fairly routinely (“D-day? No biggie”). No real surprise there.

But, then this – and by the way, this is what all the hubris and hyperbole were leading up too:

Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term president?

That’s right … politics. This is an attempt to equate saying “yes” to the raid while sitting in a room in DC to the courage necessary to execute the raid. That supposedly risking your political future is akin to actually risking your life in the raid. This is an attempt to frame a decision that really wasn’t very tough at all into an agonizing, courageous and risky choice.